It is difficult, again, without suggesting contempt of that scholarship which as concerning historical problems is the equivalent of experimental research in science, to insist aright upon the blinding tendency of pure scholarship in the face of a radically innovating doctrine. Without scholarly survey no such doctrine can maintain itself. Yet it is one of the commonest of experiences to find the accredited scholars among the last to give an intelligent hearing to a new truth. Only for a very few was skill in the Ptolemaic astronomy a good preparation towards receiving the Copernican. The errors of Copernicus--the inevitable errors of the pioneer--served for generations to establish the Ptolemaists in theirs. And where religious usage goes hand-in-hand with an error, not one man in a thousand can escape the clutch of the double habit. Hence the special blackness of the theological record in the history of culture. In the present day the hideous memory of old crimes withholds even the clerical class as a whole from the desire to employ active persecution; but that abstention--forced in any case--cannot save the class from the special snare of the belief in the possession of fixed and absolute truth. Since the day when Tyndale was burned for translating the Sacred Books, English Christians have passed through a dozen phases of faith, from the crassest evangelicalism to the haziest sentimentalism, and in all alike they have felt, mutatis mutandis, the same spontaneous aversion to the new doctrine that disturbs the old. Who will say that the stern Tyndale, had he ever been in power, would not have made martyrs in his turn? The martyr Latimer had applauded the martyrdom of Anabaptists. The martyred Cranmer had assented to martyrdoms in his day, though a man forgiving enough in respect of his own wrongs. And if the educated Christians of to-day have reached a level at which they can recognize as old delusions not only the beliefs in relics and images and exorcisms, once all sacrosanct, but the "literal" acceptance of Semitic and Christian myths and miracle-stories, to whom do they think they owe the deliverance? To their accredited teachers? Not so.